What's New for Patient Groups?

• With the introduction of Vision+, you can now create up to the minute recall programs using Vision+ Patient Reports (accessed from the Reporting menu on the Vision 3 front screen). See Create a New Vision+ Recall Letter Template and Running a Mail Merge from Patient Target Lists

• Extract Audit Option England Only - There is a new Extract Audit option in the Clinical Audit Options list. The Extract audit option does not currently display any audits, it is purely in preparation for the General Practices Extraction Service (GPES) implementation. See Selecting a Clinical Audit Group for details.

• Personalised Letters Recorded inConsultation Manager – There is now an optional tool which allows you to file the correspondence in the patients Consultation Manager record. The letter files into the Miscellaneous – Correspondence SDA of Consultation Manager and consultation details are recorded. There are no changes to recalls. See Generating Recalls and Letters for details.

• When you add a bulk recall to a patient group or Work Group, you are presented with the usual Recall add form which also displays the new Recall Status field. The Recall Status defaults to Outstanding but you are able to change this selection to <none>, Cancelled or Completed

• You can now purge old patient groups to remove obsolete groups, see Removing Obsolete Patient Groups for details. We strongly recommend you run this utility straightaway to reduce the number of groups in Patient Groups. Run it again after importing and generating a new version of an audit or after deleting an audit.
• Only user groups will be displayed by default once DLM 270 is downloaded, not system groups. You will need to use Set Filter to display system groups.
• New filter for displaying groups in Browse Options - Set Filter (Control F) (see Setting the Patient Groups Filters). New features let you: select groups by current user; select types of system groups, eg audit search or sub search, MIQUEST and/or other system groups; select groups by keyword in title, eg asthma.
• New Clear Filter icon removes any filters you have applied and returns to the full list of user groups.
• You can select a group by audit line (see Selecting a Clinical Audit Group) rather than having to search it by name. The browser resembles the Clinical Audit list.
• You can select from recently used groups (see Displaying the Most Recently Used Patient Groups) as you can in Microsoft Office Products.
• Generate History now allows Read dictionary browse (see Generating History Entries) by pressing F3 at Read Term for Characteristic
• Patient Groups now opens maximised if you maximised the screen the last time you used it.
• F3 can be used to select a patient where appropriate.
• When saving a Workgroup, the Save dialogue is populated with the existing name and description which you can amend or overwrite. See Save Work Group.
• When saving a Workgroup, you are alerted if there is already a group with the same name but you are then allowed to save it with the same name.
• Both group name and description are shown where appropriate
• The Patient Groups window now remains open after deleting a group.
• The right patient data pane now refreshes when changing patient in the left patient pane via a single click or up/down arrow, or mouse wheel.

• When you view a group, new right mouse menu options let you print the group, save the group, or open Consultation Manager for a specific patient within the group.

• Using Generate History, you can now add a History entry to each patient in a group of patients from within Patient Groups, in the same way as a recall can be added (see Generating History Entries).

Reminders

• You can now generate your own reminders for any group from within Patients Groups (see Reminders). These appear as yellow post-its in Consultation Manager as part of a patient's record. You can also manually attach a reminder against an individual patient within Consultation Manager.

There are now several sorts of reminders:

• Reminders for groups, which are created within the Patient Groups module and then assigned either to every patient in the group (Group Global Reminders)
• or to selected patients within the group (Group Applied Reminders).
• Reminders that are manually added to a patient within Consultation Manager, and the text applies only to that patient (Manual Reminders).
• Clinical Audit reminders as at present.

Double sorting patient groups

• You can now double sort patient groups. You can already sort by description name of group, by count or by date by first choosing one of these options from the Browse Options menu. Next click on the column header, eg Description, to list the groups in A-Z or Z-A order. To sort a second column, eg Date, hold the Control key down before clicking on the column header.

  Tip If you want to view or make an audit group $AUD and $SUB into the Work Group, you can find out what the group is called in Clinical Audit by holding the Control key down and right clicking on the audit line. This gives a table that is headed with the group name. You can then look for that $AUD or $SUB name in Patient Groups. Note - the group name changes every time you regenerate statistics, delete audit lines or import new searches. One way to find an audit group is to make a note of the count against the audit line in Clinical Audit. Then in Patient Groups, Sort by Count then double sort by date to get the most recent. This should make finding the group easier. Click on the blue blob (Make into Work Group) then Group - Save Work Group, and give it a new name and description. It then becomes a user group rather than a system group.